Quickly, Alix went to the telephone table, looked up Cassie’s number in the slim county directory, dialed it. It rang eight, nine, ten times. No answer. She let it ring ten more: still no answer. Damn! She checked the number again, redialed. Still no response. Cassie must be one of those people who didn’t like to be awakened by the phone, who unplugged it before going to bed. Either that, or she’d gone out on some early-morning errand.
Frantic now, Alix tried to think of someone else to call. But no one else in Hilliard would be likely to help her. And the sheriff.. no, she couldn’t call the sheriff. It was either walk to the village or stay here, and she couldn’t stay here.
Her pea jacket was on a peg next to the door; she put it on, hastily checked her pocket for the keys, and went out. The early-morning air was warmer than she’d expected, and very damp from the fog. The odor of the sea was strong, salt-laden. There was no sound anywhere except for the muffled crash of the surf against the rocks below the cliffs.
The gate stood open as Jan had left it last night. Instinctively, she tugged it shut behind her; the moisture that saturated the rough whitewashed boards made her shiver. For a moment she stood looking south along the curve of the shoreline, saw the surf roiling over the beach where she’d walked with Cassie-slate-gray water topped with white foam. Ahead of her the terrain was partially obscured by the low-hanging mist. She stifled another shiver, set off at a fast walk along the road.
On either side of her the mist was pervasive, half obliterating the shapes of scrub vegetation and rocks. It seemed to mute all sound: the waking rustles of birds in the gorse and Oregon grape, the slap of her tennis shoes on the uneven surface of the roadbed. She kept her eyes cast downward, concentrating on where she was walking, trying not to think of what might await her in Hilliard.
After a mile or so she came on the long stretch where those strange porcupine-like clumps of tule grass grew; the mist made them look more than ever like herds of some alien animal lying in wait. Then she was into the thick copse of fir trees, and the darkness in there made her hurry, so that she was almost running by the time she emerged.
Past the open fields where sheep huddled together for warmth. Past another stand of trees. And then she was alongside the gully where the body of the strangled hitchhiker had been found… she recognized it with a rippling frisson and quickened her pace again.
How far to the county road now? Less than a mile, she was certain of that. But she was tiring rapidly, and to keep herself going she played a childlike game with herself: See that cluster of cypress ahead? When you get past that, you’ll be able to see the intersection. And when she reached the cypress, and the county road was still nowhere in sight: See that sharp curve up there? The junction is just past it…
She was well beyond the curve, passing through another section of sheep graze, when something caught her eye: metal glinting in the weeds in a hollow to the left of the road.
The metal was silvery, dull in the muted light. Although the grass was high, in the hollow, she could see traces of another color-a bright, electric blue.
She stopped abruptly, peering down there. What looked to be tire marks gouged the grassy verge, and a section of the fence between the road and the hollow had been knocked down, flattened, as if by something heavy-a car, perhaps. Alix frowned, biting her lip. Then, hesitantly, she moved toward the fence, closer to what lay in the high grass of the hollow. Close enough to identify it.
A bicycle.
Mandy Barnett’s bicycle?
Its front tire was flat, and the handlebars were bent at an odd angle; the spokes of the rear wheel were mangled. And the bike didn’t look as if it had lain there for tong-it wasn’t rusted, and the bright blue paint was relatively new. Bright blue paint that matched the poncho and headband Mandy habitually wore.
Alix felt a sharpening of both tension and fear. An accident? Was that why Mandy hadn’t shown up at the lighthouse last night? But who would be driving on the cape road late at night, who else but No.
Maybe the girl was still here somewhere. Unconscious, or too weak or badly hurt to move, to call for help. Alix stood listening. All she heard was the wind, the distant bleat of a sheep.
“Mandy? Mandy?”
There was no answer.
She stepped over the broken-down section of fence, went down into the hollow. The bicycle was all that lay in the high grass there. She moved out on the other side, around a clump of spiky gorse bushes-calling as she went, focusing hard on her surroundings to keep from focusing on her thoughts.
She had gone fifty yards or so from the hollow, toward a grouping of scrub pine, when she saw something else blue in among the trees. She stopped, peering that way. Couldn’t see it now. Her eyes were gritty and in the mist everything seemed to blur together. Struggling to maintain her footing on the uneven ground, she hurried toward the pines… and saw the blue again… and hurried even more.
The trees grew in a tight little circle, as if, like the sheep, they were huddling for protection from the elements. Their branches were heavy, low-hanging, and sticky with sap. Alix pushed against them, bent forward at the waist. And there, on a little patch of needled ground, she found Mandy.
The girl was lying motionless, face down, her blue-and-white poncho grass-stained and torn. The headband was gone; her red curls were spread in a tangled fan across her shoulders. One of her legs was drawn up, bent at the knee, and both arms were outflung.
Fearfully Alix knelt, touched the girl’s shoulder. “Mandy?” There was no response. No sign that Mandy was even breathing.
She grasped one of the thin wrists, felt for a pulse, didn’t find one. Unheedful of warnings about moving accident victims, she took hold of Mandy’s shoulder and turned the girl onto her back.
“Oh dear God!”
Mandy’s face was a purplish-black hue, the tip of her tongue visible between her lips. Her head was twisted at an odd angle. Across her cheeks and neck were bloodless scratches. And her eyes… her eyes were wide open, bulging, blood-suffused, grotesquely sightless.
Alix recoiled, fought down a surge of nausea. Scrambled to her feet and batted her way free of the pines and began to run back toward the road. Even in her state of shock, she knew she would never forget those dead staring eyes.
Strangled… just like the hitchhiker… run down with a car while riding her bike, chased or carried or dragged over here and strangled…
And Jan took the station wagon… and Jan didn’t come home last night…
Part Three
MID-OCTOBER
Mad or sane, it does not matter, for the end is the same in either case. I fear now that the lighthouse will shatter and fall. I am already shattered, and must fall with it.
Jan
He couldn’t remember.
Last night was a blur, its images as gray and formless as the fog piled up dirtily outside the station wagon’s windshield. He couldn’t even remember waking up; he was just sitting here behind the wheel, shivering from the cold, staring out at the fog, with a sour taste in his mouth like that of sleep and hangover.
Where was he? He didn’t even know that. The fog obscured his surroundings, except for glimpses now and then of rocks, stunted trees, a flat stretch of stony ground. Some distance away surf made a faint hissing sound, like voices whispering angrily in the mist.
Another blackout.
His head hurt; he couldn’t think straight. But it wasn’t the bulging, only vestiges of it-a dull pounding as steady and rhythmic as the sea hammering at the unseen shore. He lifted his hands, pressed the palms against his temples; but he was shaking so badly, they set up a vibration in his head that intensified rather than eased the pain.